2025 Workshop
Heba Alnajada
Assistant Professor of Global Modern and Contemporary Architecture in the History of Art & Architecture Department at Boston University
(Re)inscribing the Ruins of ‘Informality’ with Palestinian Tahjir and its Camps
Today, in exile from al-Dawiyama village, the Palestinian inhabitants of Muhammad Amin Camp in Amman contemplate another ruin to describe another absence. They use the ruins of a World Bank-funded project to contemplate camp life. As one of my interlocutors stood before a modern road, she chose the architectural ruins of demolished houses to tell a story of sustained humanitarian non-recognition now occluded by developmental imaginaries of ‘informality.’Using a pre-Islamic poetic form, the qasida, she chose “absence to describe it,” to use Darwish’s haunting words. The mother of seven then pulled another self to describe a multigenerational story of (re)building lives and houses in the immediate aftermath of her family’s historical calamity, al-tahjir (expulsion) from Palestine, and their continued exile in refugee camps.
Working with ruins, absence, and erasure as a starting point, this paper probes the Palestinian experience of ruination, dispossession, and exile/refuge at two levels. On one level, this paper tells the story of Nakba’s metamorphosis from a historical calamity (al-tahjir) to a ruinous ongoing process that includes the erasure of camps through informalization. It does so by historicizing how and why the camp went from being recognized by Jordanian host authorities to becoming a ‘squatter settlement’ in World Bank projects, all the while remaining non-recognized by the UN body responsible for Palestine refugees, UNRWA. And how the camp was made absent, erased from formal maps, reports, and discourses. In so doing, it exposes a new form of epistemic and spatial dispossession brought upon the Palestinians, that is, when the refugee camp component of the question of Palestine became submerged under ‘informality.’
On another level, the micro and agentic level, this paper reveals how Palestinian inhabitants of the camp continue to inhabit and claim what is now a densely built urban environment, a camp (mukhayyam). By contemplating the site and traces of ruination/development through informalization (street, alleys, houses, pavement), the paper takes two cuts into the camp as a political form of life. The first peels backward through women’s history-telling practices (Sayigh 1998) and how, against depoliticization, they tell stories of camp building as the direct spatial result of “al-tahjir.” Then moves forward through stories of forging lives and better futures here in the camp. Here, I look at how camp inhabitants use the traces of informality to critique the unjust imagination of a development project. But also, how camp inhabitants reposition camp-life within developmental spatial imaginaries. A street becomes a space for self-built swings and continued construction. Camp women improve and expand houses over the modern street through the financial means of everyday economic solidarities (compare to Allan 2013). In other words, by contemplating the architectural ruins of informality and juxtaposing them with continued inhabitation and construction, presence and absence are made visible.
Together, both levels, historicizing and contemplating, macro and micro, reveal how the mukhayyam, as vocabulary and grammar of inhabitation, remained resistant to the forces that did not recognize its legitimacy and those that sought to informalize it. Attuned to Palestinian, Arab, and Islamic spatial vocabulary, this paper stresses the need to consider, more seriously, epistemologically and ontologically, both the tenacious Palestinian insistence on the name mukhayyam and the use of al-tahjir, a word that carries the lessons of the Prophet’s historic migration from Mecca to Medina and the Islamic forging of community and refuge. It is in this sense that (re)inscribing the ruins of ‘informality’ with Palestinian Tahjir and its camps, as the title suggests, has a radical currency: it articulates an anti-colonial life, repositioning the camp inside legitimate politics, insisting on claiming Palestine, past and future, while revealing Islamic traditions of refuge that have withdrawn past a submission to Euro-American colonialism, western humanitarianism, and Bretton Woods institutions.
*** This paper is based on a work-in-progress chapter of my book, tentatively titled Sedimentary Refuge: Islamic Hijra and Refugee Camps in Amman.
Heba Alnajada (BA, University of Jordan; MA, University of Sheffield; PhD University of California, Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor of Global Modern and Contemporary Architecture in the History of Art & Architecture Department at Boston University. She is an architectural historian who works at the intersection of the built environment, refugees, the modern history of the Middle East, and (increasingly) the law. Her research and teaching focus on global architectural history, urbanism, migration, and the Arab and Muslim worlds.